MAY 25 - Head out of Cēsis today, on the bus to Riga. As usual, the bus has wifi.
We arrive late afternoon and make our way to an apartment we are renting. It is in an old, worn out building with a musty, dark stairwell, but the apartment itself is nice.
Riga is a lot busier than we have seen for awhile. The city sprawls out in all directions from the old part which hugs the northern bank of the Dauvaga River. Though the city is very close to the Gulf of Riga, urban development does not reach the ocean. The natural harbor that the original inhabitants used was slightly upstream, at the confluence of the Dauvaga and a much smaller river. The city traces its beginnings to 1199 and the arrival of Crusaders, who eventually organized as the Livonian Order (a branch of the Teutonic Order). As such, the most influential immigrants were the German-speaking people (as with Estonia), even as the region passed from Polish, to Swedish, and later to Russian domination.
Latvia, like Estonia, had a brief moment of independence after WWI, but became absorbed into the Soviet Union after WWII. Its current period of independence began in 1991.
